What to Expect from Xbox in 2023
Microsoft’s fourth-generation Xbox consoles, the Xbox Series X and Series S, are now entering Year 3. And though Year 1 started with a soft launch in the exclusive games department, the second half of this generation’s first year delivered the flood that parched Xbox fans have waited years for. From Forza Horizon 5 to Halo Infinite to Psychonauts 2 to Microsoft Flight Simulator, it sure seemed like the Xbox’s exclusive games drought was finally over [Editor’s note: Whoops!]. Of course, by now you know the story because you lived through it. The whole of 2022 was like a mirage in the desert: you thought you could see water up ahead, but was it really there? As such, 2023 simply must deliver for Xbox gamers who’ve invested so much in the platform. Microsoft is a trillion-dollar company who has seemingly exhausted the patience of its player base. Fortunately, though, there’s reason to be optimistic.
The conversation around blockbuster exclusives for Xbox in 2023 begins and ends with Starfield, the first brand-new IP from renowned game designer Todd Howard in decades, and the first game he’s directed at all since Fallout 4 back in 2015. Howard tried to call his shot back in 2020, promising an 11/11/22 release date a full 18 months early. That didn’t work out, but now Starfield is finally almost here, and with apologies to Arkane’s Redfall (which we’ll get to in a moment), Starfield is not just the biggest game to come out of Bethesda since Microsoft bought the publisher for $7.5 billion two years ago, it is, on paper, the kind of exclusive that makes people want to buy into the Xbox ecosystem. And for the millions of players still enjoying the Starfield team’s own Skyrim, there’s good news: Starfield just might be Skyrim in
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